In the usual course of doing business, service providers, particularly travel service providers, frequently add numerous and varied fees and surcharges to the basic cost of a service. In some cases the total of the extra fees may approach or even surpass the cost of the base services. Therefore, it is important for customers of such service provider to track those fees. Moreover, fees among different providers are not always comparable, and many service providers purposely do not list or otherwise bring to light those fees, because hiding the fees and surcharges allows them to protect some high margin revenues.
What is clearly needed is a system and method for breaking out and estimating the various fees and surcharges charged by each service provider to an organization or to individuals in general that uses the services of competing providers, rather than listing just a basic negotiated service fee, thus allowing a true comparison of the overall cost of the purchased services.
To optimize the cost of purchased services to travel provisioning systems, such as travel arrangers and/or organizations, collected information about the cost structures of such service providers, for example, hotels, airlines, and others, may be used to make a comparative analysis. To make such an analysis, a breakdown of the costs into their components is necessary. Currently, no models for such an approach are known to the inventors to exist in the market. What is used is a market-price-based approach, but the problem with that approach is that if two companies are inefficient in different areas, their market price may be the same, so any opportunity to achieve savings is not visible.
What is clearly needed is a system and method to refine and support an analysis of the costs and cost breakdowns for services provided to a services provisioning system by allowing users to compare costs of components of services provided, extracting and comparing information of actual billing, and allowing users to mix and match the lowest-cost services or allowing users to direct cost savings into preferred partners.